Building Fauna’s GDPR-compliant distributed and scalable database infrastructure with Pulumi required overcoming significant engineering challenges, including repeatable, scalable, efficient, and maintainable infrastructure management. To address these challenges, the team used tools like Pulumi, which enables operators to define their infrastructure in code that can be reviewed and audited. Pulumi's object-oriented programming paradigms allowed the team to model infrastructure using standard libraries, review changes via existing code review processes, and run unit tests against those objects. The team split their infrastructure code into multiple projects, tied them together with a structured naming scheme, and used stacks to achieve zero customer impact during rollout. Pulumi's integration with HashiCorp's Vault provided an elegant solution for access control, while the Automation API is planned to further simplify and automate the infrastructure release process in the future.